Disrupt Censorship! How To Keep Seeing News That Matters To You

Is it algorithms? Or maybe censorship? Or do people just not care anymore? These are the questions going through many people’s minds as it becomes increasingly more difficult to stay informed in our world.

Facebook became the top source for driving news and information to people in 2015. According to Parse.ly’s chief technical officer, Andrew Montalenti, latest estimates show that social media sources (of which Facebook is by far the largest) accounted for about 43% of the traffic to the Parse.ly network of media sites, while Google accounted for just 38%.

Now you might also have been hearing how Facebook’s algorithm has changed and many publishers are now seeing a decline in traffic from Facebook. There are likely a number of reasons for this and we will get to them shortly.

The cries of ‘Fake News’ began hitting the internet following Hillary Clinton’s loss of the U.S. election. A scared, shocked, and tattered elite and mainstream media found out the true power of independent media and its influence. WikiLeaks was able to publish leak after leak during the election that independent media made popular, while mainstream media tried to bury and debunk it.

The popularity of this content and resulting change in public opinion show we are in a very unique time, one where mainstream media can’t simply bully their way into everyone’s minds like they once could.

It’s important to note that we also exist in an age so incredibly obsessed with physical proof that we rarely give credit to gut feelings and intuition, which happen to have been the inspiration behind most amazing discoveries and understandings we love and admire today.

Having been in media for almost eight years now running Collective Evolution, one of the largest independent media outlets in the world, I can tell you from from my own gut instinct that there is a war on information right now and it’s being fought harder now than ever before.

Enter Fake News

A shocked democratic camp looked for someone to blame after its election loss. After going through a series of blame candidates, eventually things turned to ‘fake news’ and websites that promote ‘Russian propaganda.’ A list of websites began circulating that were allegedly responsible for reporting fake news. While I know for a fact that some of the websites on that list did and do report fake news, many of them don’t. Instead, they simply bring forth a perspective you won’t hear on mainstream news, one that threatens specific, politically charged rhetoric and agendas.

Literally on the DAY this list was released, we began seeing a decline in our organic reach on Facebook, and a big one at that. Whether by coincidence or not, the change was instantaneous. To us it was easy to see what was happening, but we wanted to be sure. So we began asking Facebook page admins who run pages that do not report on news like us if their reach had dropped. It hadn’t.

The graph below beautifully illustrates what happened. The very day the fake news craze began taking over the media, our organic reach suddenly dropped. Even before anyone could figure out who the culprits were, whether they were actually producing fake news or not, we had been targeted.

Graph illustrates reach drop starting just after US election in 2016.

Was it a calculated effort? An excuse to drop reach on websites that challenge mainstream propaganda and conjecture? I’m sure we will find out in years to come, but so far it has been interesting to see.

About two weeks after this happened I was doing a live interview in Toronto. After the interview I had the chance to meet with and speak with audience members who told me they have been following CE for many years and engage with it every day. After all of this I finally asked them, “Do you still see our content in your newsfeed?” With puzzled looks they recalled, “No, now that you mention it — I don’t see it anymore.” I grinned and told them to make sure they visit our page or website manually since it’s unlikely they will see our content in their feed any longer.

Following that, I decided to run a quick survey on my own personal Facebook profile. I asked if people ever see any CE content in their newsfeed anymore. The results were very interesting.

Of the 190 people that responded, 18% said they still see it in some form, whether once a day or a couple times per week. Of those, about 30% see it because they have set their News Feed to show CE first. These 190 people are people I engage with quite regularly. I see them engage with CE’s content often and know they support our work. So why, then, and all of a sudden, do they not see something they engage with regularly? Facebook always touts that “if you create good, engaging content, your audience will continue to see it,” but that simply isn’t happening.

Even when I scroll through my own News Feed, I only see posts from pages like Quartz, BuzzFeed, CBC News, and so forth. These are all pages I don’t even have ‘liked.’ And they aren’t sponsored posts, either. The vast majority of the remainder of posts I see are updates from friends that are typically about their day. What happened to all the interesting links, videos, and other content I used to see?

In August of 2016 Facebook announced a new algorithm update that would predict which posts a user might find “informative” and prioritize said posts in the user’s News Feed. The challenge here is, what if it is wrong? How does a user define what he or she likes? What if it’s a cover for forms of censorship?

So What’s the Story?

Facebook must do things that people want, that people ask for. After all, they are creating a platform and running a business to please many people. Facebook has told us through their many reports that people want to see updates from friends, not from pages, and so they have been slowly changing the News Feed. But the funny thing is, regardless of what seems to change, the big brands like BuzzFeed, VICE, and HuffPost always seem to have a spot in the feed. Why?

And why do we keep receiving emails and messages from our audience saying they want to see our content in their feed but don’t anymore? Is it true that users don’t want to see pages? Maybe Facebook took it too far? Is there censorship going on?

Facebook must also please shareholders. Having businesses pay for reach or other forms of advertisement is an obvious monetization model for Facebook, and this is totally acceptable. They also must build an algorithm that organizes the millions of posts put forth every day into relevant information for its users. This is fair. But you must wonder, if users are engaging heavily with something, why suddenly stop showing it to them? How do you suddenly decide they shouldn’t see it?

How to See What You Care About

It’s clear that Facebook is on its way out when it comes to being a platform for staying informed and getting news you care about. It is becoming (or rather, returning to) something that connects you to your friends and puts advertising in front of you to purchase products — again, totally fine. But personally, I don’t see much value in my News Feed. I imagine many users are feeling the same and have to change the way they use Facebook if they want to keep up with what’s important to them. This also creates space for another platform to come along that will provide people with what they truly want.

Information consumption habits are going to have to change if you want to stay informed. If that’s important to you, here’s what you can do:

1. Sign up to daily newsletters from the websites you love. You can do so with CE’s here.

2. Set the pages you like to ‘See First’ in your News Feed. This can be done quite easily and will help to keep you informed. Simply hover over the “Following” button and click “See First.”

3. Download mobile apps that belong to the sites you love to stay in touch with them.

4. Manually go to a website or Facebook page each day to stay up to date.

Indigenous peoples in Brazil are once again on the front lines today of one of the most brutal attacks on their rights and on the forest in recent history. We’re now seeing the drastic rollback of 30 years of progress on human rights and environmental protection in Brazil under Bolsonaro’s regime, which romanticizes Brazil’s past when military dictatorship took helm and presided over wanton destruction of the forest. The Munduruku people have been resisting encroachment and destruction of their land for centuries, and their fight (along with other indigenous groups and the very spirit of the Amazon jungle itself) is more urgent than ever as Brazil’s government and commercial industries continue to violate with impunity.

The tragedy currently taking place in the Amazon is indicative of a broader cultural problem in regards to our relationship with our planet. 1/5th of all the world’s plants and birds and about 1/10th of all mammal species are found in the Amazon. Earth has lost half its wildlife in the past four decades. Based on an analysis of thousands of vertebrate species by the wildlife group WWF and the Zoological Society of London, our way of life has presided over the destruction of 60% of our animal populations since 1970. The report calculates a global “ecological footprint,” which measures the area required to supply the ecological goods and services humans use. It concludes that humanity currently needs the regenerative capacity of 1.5 Earths to supply these goods and services each year.

With the planet’s population expected to grow by 2.4 billion people by 2050, the challenge of providing enough food, water and energy (while sustaining planetary health) will be difficult. This should be the real “RED ALERT” placated all over the media, as the shocking and rapid decline of planetary biodiversity poses an imminent catastrophe that plagues all of us, requiring urgent and bold alterations to our way of life.

That being said, we have more than enough resources to profit food and shelter to billions of people. Solutions done seem to be the problem, it’s human consciousness, greed and ego.

Outrage is an understandable response to the Amazon crisis, but not sufficient to redress the problem. We need to take individual action in our daily lives by altering our lifestyles. One of the most under-reported aspects of Amazonian deforestation is our addiction to consuming meat. Beef, soy, palm oil and wood drive the majority of tropical deforestation.

Animal agriculture is devastating for the Earth. Raising livestock for meat, eggs and milk uses about 70% of agricultural land, and is a primary factor in the proliferation of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and water pollution.

“1.2 billion farmed animals are slaughtered globally every week for human consumption. In one week, more farmed animals are killed than the total number of people killed in all wars throughout history. Although these animals are treated as commodity, they are — in fact — sentient beings — like your pet cat or dog. We tend to assume that only vegans and vegetarians follow a belief system — but when eating animals is not a necessity (which is the case in much of the world today) — then it is a choice, and choices stem from beliefs. “Carnism” is a dominant philosophy — as eating animals is just the way things are — yet it runs contrary to core human values such as compassion, justice, and authenticity. And so — they need to use defense mechanisms that distort our thoughts and numb our feelings so that we act against our core values without fully realizing what we are even doing.” ~Dr. Melanie Joy

The challenges that face our planet, our indigenous family, and our own imminent future are immense. It is easy to feel discouraged, angry, and hopeless about the state of the world, but the ability to harness humanity’s intelligence, creativity and compassion to steer the planet in a new direction is with us right now. We can take individual responsibility today, which can resonate immediately and create waves of influence that can lead to a collective change in behavior and attitudinal shift towards our relationship with nature and with ourselves. This change starts from within, and this work begins with each of us making the choice to defend and protect this wondrous planet which has so graciously hosted our livelihood.

In Brief

The Facts:

A parent of a child formerly enrolled in the MUSE school in California sent us an email detailing the school's use of the Process Communications Model (PCM), while observing that the school is not as inspiring as their promotional materials suggests.

Reflect On:

How do you know when a fundamentally good idea is going too far?

A cursory glance at the ‘MUSE School,’ co-founded by James Cameron’s wife, and you see an educational institution that aspires to be inclusive, inspiring, and liberating for children of all ages. The motto on their school’s website is “Inspiring and Preparing Young People to Live Consciously with Themselves, One Another, and the Planet.”

There is much to admire about the goals of this school. It started off as a small group of kids whose parents were celebrities, including James Cameron’s own. The focus was a personalized curriculum based on learning through passion projects while being exposed to the practices of environmental sustainability. Since the program has grown, in-house vegan meals have been included in the annual tuition, which ranges from about $22,000 for pre-K children (2.3-4.9 years old) to about $33,000 for high school kids (grades 9-12).

The school was also founded by Suzy Amis Cameron’s sister Rebecca Amis, who was the first head of the school. Rebecca Amis had previously tried to start an early childhood education center called ‘childspot!’ in Witchita, Kansas, which Amis’ then-husband Scott Taylor was to be the business manager for. Surprisingly, there is no searchable information on the internet for childspot!, although our reader did provide this article from 1998 in which plans to start their early childhood education center were mentioned.

Introducing PCM To Students

A little while after co-founding the MUSE school in California, Rebecca Amis installed her new husband Jeff King as head of the school. He brought on board a new ‘communication’ methodology into the classroom. The introduction of this method to children as young as 2 years old is the main subject I will cover here. Instead of describing this methodology myself I will start off with testimony that was emailed to me from the parent of a former student to provide some background and reveal her feelings and experiences around the use of PCM in an academic setting:

“Jeff King is the one who introduced the ‘Process Communication Model’ (PCM) to the school, having himself obtained a master trainer title. Many families at this point left the school, not being comfortable with the idea of their kids being the subject of what was clearly an experiment. The school turned plant-based at the same time so they blamed the drop in numbers to people not being happy with the new menu (which is completely false).

Created by Dr Taibi Kahler, a psychologist from Arkansas, it was designed mainly for the corporate world. According to Kahler, there are six distinct personality types: HARMONIZER, THINKER, PERSISTER, IMAGINER, REBEL, AND PROMOTER. Each of us develops a predominant personality type early in life, and that does not change. It is our basic Personality Type all our lives. Each type has specific Motivators characterized by differences in Character Strengths, Psychological Needs and Perceptions.

Each personality comes with a set of psychological needs and specific communication ‘channels’ which include specific words, tone and facial expressions. Although it was never intended for children, Mr. King decided to make it the innovative tool that would differentiate his school from others.

This sounds all wonderful from the outside. What parent wouldn’t want their kids to have tools that will help them communicate better with one another and the world?

Unfortunately the truth is far from that.

Since the personality test cannot be officially administered to the student until high school, they teach the lower grade students PCM through play and activities. The teachers (some brand new to PCM) use their own judgment to asses the kids’ personality so they can start using their appropriate channels with them. (I have plenty of pictures I can send you giving you examples of how they teach PCM to the kids).

The teachers are constantly applying PCM to the students and using what they believe is their specific channel. In return they expect the kids to respond in the teachers’ own channel. Some are pretty rude and direct and yet the kids are expected to learn to use such language. For example, if the teacher’s channel is “tell”, she expects the students to communicate in sentences that are “tell”. So instead of “may I please have a pencil”, the tell channel will be “give me that pencil”.

I have myself seen teachers snapping at students or at colleagues because they weren’t using the correct channels.

Last year the high school students voted to stop practicing PCM in the high school campus. Unfortunately, the younger children are subjected to this on a daily basis. Each child is labeled a personality type and their behavior is almost always excused to their personality label. The parents take the official PCM personality test and the results are then shared with all the faculty members (the parents are unaware of this and never were asked to sign a release form for that). The staff will then go out of their way to address you in the designated channel as they believe that’s what’s needed to keep you a happy customer.

Issues brought up by the students or their families are disregarded as they are seen as a sign of distress. Once that happens the main focus of the faculty is to get the parent or the child out of the system by using manipulation techniques mixed with PCM jargon.

Kids that are being bullied are made to believe that they are just as much at fault as the bully. Parents are constantly told that there are absolutely no issues to worry about and the ones that dare to protest end up always getting kicked out of school or forced to leave.

Discrimination is obvious based on your personality type, whether it’s a student or parent. There are a couple of personalities that are viewed as more troublesome and risky, and the school is keen to identify those individuals. PCM was born as a tool for the corporate world, not for a school and this is the only school in the world that uses it. It is very much a “cultish” atmosphere. The staff is so concentrated on listening carefully to your words and observing your body language in order to figure out what channel to use and if by any chance you have ‘phased’ to another personality then it becomes impossible to have a real honest conversation. And they do the same with the kids depriving them of an authentic connection or the tools to learn to connect with others.

By third grade kids and parents are in full mode PCM. The kids are robotic and set into their ‘personality’. They have a set language and manners which unfortunately the outside world does not always understand.

I wish you could meet some of the students. Some are like robots, they just seem to repeat scripts. There is no talk of consciousness or free thinking which I guess is ’normal’ in many schools, but PCM is close to brainwashing. It’s like an instruction manual on how you should behave, think and speak.

I watched our own child going through the struggle of mentally detoxing from it once we were out of the school. For a while my child was confused, lost in a way especially when the world didn’t respond to my child’s PCM channel, unable to relate. And we are talking about a healthy bright child with no social or personal issues. And now my child doesn’t even want to hear the word PCM.

In my experience Mr. King (as per the book he published – Beyond Drama) enforces the belief that everyone is okay and there are no issues. In order to stay out of drama, individuals must believe that they are okay and everyone else is okay. So basically there are never any issues. They believe and support that philosophy to an extreme and therefore refuse to really acknowledge any real serious issue brought to them. So they hide the problems hoping time will make them go away without having to act on them.

Naturally when real issues are brought up to him by parents, the concerns are dismissed and seen as a sign of distress of the parent. At this point all effort are made to PCM the parent out of the distress and pretend all is good.

Same for students. He doesn’t for example seem to believe in bullying and I have personally watched a 5th grader who had just been repeatedly teased to tears by a classmate being told that he must have had a part in it to deserve it. Through what appeared in my opinion as clever manipulation, the kid and the parents left the meeting believing that there was no bullying in the first place.

Global Expansion. This year, coinciding with Suzy Cameron’s new book launch (One Meal a day) the school decided to create a new for-profit corporation, MUSE Global. Mr. King is their CEO (while retaining his position of Head of the School at MUSE, which is a non-profit). The company focuses on the expansion of the MUSE School’s model globally. Despite the original school being far from successful (people keep leaving, they are unable to raise funds and students score very poorly academically), they seem to be on a mission to convince the world that their module is the best a child can get. They have already signed an agreement with some investors in China and working on more.

Power, Manipulation and Scare Tactics. Numerous families are not happy but they are too scared to say anything for fear of their kids being kicked out (it has happened to many families that dared to challenge the system, 5 in the past school year alone). Some of those families tried to appeal to the school’s board of directors (a few of the members were MUSE parents themselves). The ones that tried to help those families were forced to leave the school, their kids included. The ones who refused to intervene explained, ‘Nothing we can do, they have us by the balls.”

Unfortunately they know how powerful they are and they appear to be using that power to keep families in a state of fear. Many of the students come from families that are in the show business and nobody wants to be on the wrong side of the Camerons, no matter what their children were put through.”–parent of a former MUSE School student

My Take

We must be careful in discerning one person’s testimony. We must look for signs of an inner consistency, and a plausibility that links facts and observations with the opinions this person holds. For me, this testimony has a high level of consistency, especially around the potential dangers of introducing a fully integrated system of labeling and classifying students and teachers in an academic setting.

“Once you label me, you negate me.”–Soren Kierkegaard

When I was doing my life-coaching training, many of the coaches who had already been working in the corporate world spoke highly of the Myers-Briggs type indicator and other tools that categorized a person’s personality type. As a life coach, I always had a resistance to any form of ‘typing’ of a client into a category. I felt it would limit my perception of a person, affect the ways I would challenge them to see things differently, and, most importantly, could limit the person’s belief in what they were capable of. Even when clients would give me their Myers-Briggs ‘identity,’ (i.e. “I’m an INTJ and that’s why I see things this way…”), I would not seek to capitalize on the information behind the client’s self-classification and would remain present to the identity being revealed through the person words, tone, expressions, and so on. Categorizing oneself as the fundamental guideline of one’s sense of identity is, in my opinion, very limiting.

I understand that these personality-typing tools can have some benefits for allowing managers in the corporate world to understand better what makes each individual employee tick. It can help them accept that people have different strengths and weaknesses, learn in different ways, and get satisfaction in different ways. These insights can lead a manager to work with greater compassion, patience, and flexibility. If the information is used to benefit the employee and enable them to get more satisfaction and fulfillment from their job, leading them to become more productive, then it is a win-win proposition.

However, these tools can very easily be used as means of manipulation in the hands of those who lack maturity or have a hidden agenda to control people rather than act in service to the people they are using these tools on. In a classroom setting with children as young as two, where the foundations of a child’s perception of reality are still in their formative stages, it is reasonable to fear that PCM has the potential to cause harm to a child, perhaps in ways even worse than described above by our parent.

These are subtle matters, but certainly worth thinking about. Below is a clip from a video from the MUSE school which promotes the use of PCM techniques in elementary classrooms.

Does this video leave you with the feeling that empowering communication is going on here, or manipulation? And if this is what is being touted as proof that the methodology works and is beneficial, can we see the potential for this methodology to go too far and lead to discrimination and some forms of mind programming?

To some extent, good teachers naturally learn to communicate with students in different ways based on their personalities. While I applaud MUSE’s philosophy of attempting to communicate with children in the ways that they respond to best and most comfortably, it is the formalization of this process that scares me. And certainly, when we hear that young children are truly being trained to see the world through the filter of PCM, and potentially can be rebuked if they don’t respond to teachers according to each teacher’s ‘channel,’ then we can understand why parents like our reader above have had serious concerns about PCM in an academic setting.

The reader who emailed us is not alone in their criticism of PCM and its implementation in the school. If you take a look at answers to the question ‘How would you rate your experience at this school?’ on greatschools.org from other parents whose children are/were in MUSE, you will see an interesting pattern: 55 top ‘5 star’ reviews, 16 bottom ‘1 star’ reviews, and only 7 in the 2,3,4 star category. Many of the 5-star reviews are cookie-cutter ‘agree’ comments on pre-written bullet points. Our reader told us, “During the PCM training new parents are asked to submit their reviews which at that point are generally amazing.”

The 1 star reviews tend to be long, thoughtful criticisms of many of the same points made by our reader. Some even bring into question the authenticity of many of the positive reviews: “Notice how the last 7 positive reviews were all posted on the same day, December 18, really??” If you are interested, I would highly recommend going through some of these reviews, both the good and the bad, to help you discern what you think is really going on inside the MUSE school.

The Takeaway

As I mentioned earlier, the stated goals of the MUSE school evoke hope and inspiration. Where the education of our young has long been criticized as a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach, the MUSE school has stepped boldly towards an approach to respect individual students’ differences and preferences. The only question is whether or not they are stepping too far.

If the high school students at MUSE voted to stop practicing PCM last spring, then one would suspect that this would cause school leaders to strongly question the use of PCM in earlier grades, especially Pre-K, where students obviously don’t have a voice in the matter themselves. Certainly, the MUSE philosophy speaks to a willingness to change and evolve based on the information at hand:

MUSE is ever-evolving. The MUSE community includes creative and critical thinkers who know that flexibility and adaptability are critical keys to our success. We enthusiastically embrace change and consistently challenge ourselves in our ongoing efforts to learn, grow, and improve.

However, our reader’s testimony gives the impression that rather than being listened to and incorporated, dissenting views and criticisms of the current system are shut down and dissenters are shut out of the process. Is the school’s ongoing evolution simply being fostered within an echo chamber? Do we see fear-based control mechanisms reminiscent of the operating structures of a cult?

With the development of the for-profit MUSE Global and the inclusion of PCM as one of the five pillars of the Global schools they are franchising out, we will need to keep our eyes and ears open to determine if the MUSE project is solely about “Inspiring and Preparing Young People to Live Consciously with Themselves, One Another, and the Planet,” or if there is another agenda afoot.

Judicial Watch Sued To Get Footage of The ‘Plane’ Hitting The Pentagon On 9/11 (Video)

In Brief

The Facts:

Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton Tweeted today that he hopes to put 9/11 conspiracy theories to rest with the video of the AA plane hitting the side of the Pentagon on 9/11. The video doesn't seem to show a plane.

Reflect On:

What does the image look like to you in the video? A plane? Or a missile? What seemed to create the hole in the Pentagon? A plane or a missile?

Finally, we can put to rest the theory that a plane hit the pentagon on 9/11. Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch released a video today on his Twitter showing what looks like a Tomahawk cruise missile going into the side of the Pentagon on 9/11. Although Fitton claims this was actually a plane that hit the Pentagon, the evidence doesn’t appear to support this at all.

The ‘plane hitting the Pentagon’ theory has been a question mark for so many people as the camera footage was instantly seized showing the entire event, and there were no plane parts to be found anywhere. Not to mention the plane would have to be flying completely parallel to the ground, JUST skimming the grass to make it into the side of the Pentagon. And of course the hole made in the Pentagon doesn’t match that of a plane at all. See image below.

Image of a Tomahawk cruise missile.

I have honestly been trying to figure out what Fitton is really up to witH this post, because I almost can’t believe he thinks this is a plane which leads me to think he is doing this on purpose to help people see the truth.